1. Technical Field
The invention broadly relates to telecommunications systems and methods, and more particularly, to telecommunication systems and methods for determining attributes associated with telecommunication networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
Telecommunication network circuits are prevalent throughout the world. There are, however, many different types of telecommunication network circuits ranging from the common plain old telephone service (POTS) to more sophisticated ISDN lines, T-1 lines, T-3 lines, DS0, DS1 and a variety of other types of telecommunication network circuits. Different types of telecommunication network circuits have associated therewith a variety of attributes including telecommunication network circuit capacity, speed escalation and various other business related attributes. For example, the expiration times associated with each telecommunication network may be different, some may not be eligible for escalation, and some may be serialized while others may be non-serialized. Accordingly, there exist a variety of attributes that may be available for any or all of them.
Software systems associated with each telecommunication network circuit type generally behave differently based on the type of telecommunication network circuits and their associated attributes. Accordingly, for a software system to properly manage a particular telecommunication network circuit it must know the telecommunication network circuit type it is operating with. The type of a particular telecommunication network circuit can be determined using the telecommunication network circuit identifier (ID) number, which is a unique number associated with the telecommunication network circuit type. There are well known algorithms that can be used to determine a telecommunication network circuit type based on the telecommunication network circuit ID number.
There exist a growing number of applications in the telecommunication area that require more information about a particular telecommunication network circuit. For example, some applications must know a telephone network circuit's attributes, the validation of such attributes and other relevant information that may become relevant in the future with the advances in technology. The attributes of a T-3 telephone network circuit, for example, may change when another type of telephone network circuit is introduced in the future.
Conventional systems for determining attributes associated with telecommunication network circuits generally provide software code for the software applications for each individual type of telephone network circuit. This, however, is inefficient and redundant because essentially the same code resides across several different systems, thus increasing the overall code base and the size of the binary files associated with each software application. Having different software code creates the problem of having to reintroduce code and re-release code whenever a change is made to an attribute associated with a telephone network circuit.
Furthermore, conventional systems for determining attributes associated with telecommunication network circuits generally function in one of two ways. In one way, the information is coded into the application itself or the application contains a subset of a rule-based system. In another way, the application will go directly to a legacy system, which comprises a portion of a telecommunication network that dictates what attributes are associated with certain network circuits, and the software system can obtain the required attribute data directly from the legacy system. One problem with conventional approaches is that legacy databases are not optimized to provide attribute data and many databases may have to be searched in order to find the required data. For example, a software application may typically have to operate across several different interfaces and use techniques such as screen scraping to ascertain the required attributes information. Most legacy systems are not dedicated to obtaining attributes and most will have network latency delays of at least 30 seconds and may sometimes exceed several minutes.
There are several related art methods and systems for determining attributes associated with telecommunication network circuits and various software applications associated with different telecommunication network circuits. FIG. 1 illustrates one related art system 10 where different telecommunication network circuits 12, 14, 16 are associated with different software applications 18, 20, 22, respectively. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that the program logic can reside in the individual software applications 18, 20, 22 or can reside in a shared library among the software applications 18, 20, 22. For example, instructions associated with each of the software applications 18, 20, 22 can be executed by one central computer 24 in communication with a commonly shared database 26 that includes the attributes associated with the telecommunication network circuits 12, 14, 16. Alternatively, the instructions associated with each software application 18, 20, 22 can be executed on separate computers 28, 32, 36, respectively, wherein each computer 28, 32, 36 is in communication with databases 30, 34, 38, respectively. The individual databases 30, 34, 38 include the attributes of each telecommunication network circuit 12, 14, 16, respectively.
The related art system 10 suffers from several drawbacks, however. Namely, the system 10 is not dynamic and any changes in the telecommunication network circuit 12, 14, 16 types or attributes must be accompanied by a corresponding change in the software applications 18, 20, 16, respectively. This process further includes new releases of the software code, rebuilding, retesting and other overhead associated with updating the code in a software application. The system 10 also is inefficient because of redundancies in the code involved.
FIG. 2 illustrates another related art system 50 that uses information from a legacy system 52 in communication with a database 54 for determining attributes associated with each telecommunication network circuit 12, 14, 16 types and their behavior. The central computer 24 queries the legacy system 52 to retrieve data associated with the one or more telecommunication network circuits 12, 14, 16 stored in the database 54, for example. The data in the database 54 includes attributes of each telecommunication circuit types 12, 14, 16. The data, however, is generally not optimized for the specific information desired by the relative software applications 18, 20, 22. Network latency and accessibility are further drawbacks of this related art system 50.
Accordingly, there is a need to determine telephone network attributes without querying legacy systems. There is a further need to improve the performance and maintainability of a client software application adapted for one or more telephone network circuits.